Author Description

For more than 40 years leading businessman Pat Corrigan has been one of Australia's largest and most significant arts benefactors. A strong supporter of the innovative and of living artists, post-2000 Pat turned his eye towards Aboriginal art. The vibrancy of the art and the lives of the artists appealed - so a new collection was started. In New Beginnings, Pat Corrigan and his family reveal some of the works from this collection. New Beginnings highlights new paintings that rank amongst the contemporary masterpieces of Australian art. They include the modern masters of the Western Desert and the Kimberley - artists such as Tommy Watson, Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri, Naata Nungurrayi, Makinti Napanangka, Patju Presley, George Tjungurrayi, Eubena Nampitjin and Wingu Tingima, as well as a large range of other equally powerful paintings by both established and emerging artists. With essays on the artists by writer and curator Emily McCulloch Childs, a moving essay by University of Sydney Professor of Contemporary Art, Ross Gibson, and a preface by Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Museum of Australia, Margo Neale, the sumptuous New Beginnings also relates some of the story of Australian Aboriginal art - at once highly contemporary and equally ancient.